So I haven't done any distro hopping for a long time. I've settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I'm in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.
I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don't like their default text-editor very much, so I don't have to install it and can just use gedit instead.
I'm happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don't use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein's PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.
Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?
I'd be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.
Never used Arch but openSUSE does have a minimal install option you might like. Other than that I find it to be a pretty no-nonsense distro. Most distros have some kind of ideology, like Ubuntu is easy, Arch is minimal, etc. openSUSE is just middle of the road and doesn’t push you in any direction.
It feels pretty German out of the box but you can obviously change whatever you want. BTRFS means if anything fucks up you can just roll it back but I’ve never had to in the two years I’ve been running it. If you’re used to Arch you might find that Leap is a little slow but Tumbleweed and Slowroll both want updating constantly. I like Zypper too, it’s fast and straightforward.
That sounds pretty good.
I'm looking at Leap, specifically since I don't want to have to update constantly, and don't mind a bit older software for those machines. I just want something that's easy to maintain and somewhat ready to use, even if I haven't touched it for a few months, and Arch just tends to break if you don't update regularly.
The only thing I need up-to-date is a browser and Discord, which I'll probably install via its own flatpak anyways.
I am German myself, and I'm not sure how I have to take this. 😅 Out of my mouth this could be both a compliment and an insult, depending on context.
I can recommend Aeon for experienced users
A first look at their wiki makes it seem tempting. Low maintenance is exactly what I'm looking for, however I have zero experience with immutable systems (and I'm not even sure I completely understand what that means). Do you have any experience how well that works when using some proprietary software. For one of my use-cases Discord is (unfortunately) a hard requirement.
You probably won't feel any difference to a traditional opensuse installation. There are here and there differences but nothing end user facing. You'll install everything via flatpak and if you need specialized software you use distrobox. You can even use an arch distrobox if you still want to use the aur. The main differences is the choice of default software and settings compared to your experience with arch